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They discussed it further over a urinal in a Dravograd dive.
'Who would have been the driver?' asked Wut.
'Todor always drove,' said Vratno. 'But he also had the most flesh to get in the way of flying stuff, if you go by my theory.'
'I don't go by any theories,' said Gottlob Wut. 'It's just very pleasant to be on the road again.'
The Fourteenth Zoo Watch: Tuesday, 6 June, 1967, @ 5.00 a.m.
I'M STALLING. BUT I have my reasons!
One thing, it's beginning to get light out - as if this moon hasn't been light enough. And foremost, I don't see how I can get into the Small Mammal House without O. Schrutt seeing me. If I were inside and O. Schrutt came in, that would be a different matter; then I could listen to where he was and avoid him in the maze. But I don't like the idea of making a dash up those stairs and coming through that doorway, when I can't be sure what part of the maze O. Schrutt is in.
So I've decided: I have to wait for the plotting gelada baboon to come outside again. Now that it's getting light, I can see the outside terrace of the Monkey Complex from the end of my hedgerow. When that gelada baboon comes out, I'll make my move.
It's simple. I'll station myself behind the children's drinking fountain, near the entrance to the Small Mammal House. Then I'll get that baboon's attention; I'll lob rocks at him; I'll leap out from behind the fountain and make rude, insulting gestures. That will set him off, I know. And when he's raging, O. Schrutt will come pelting down those stairs, fit to kill. And when O. Schrutt is going through his paranoiac ritual at the Monkey Complex, I'll streak silent and barefoot into the Small Mammal House; I'll get myself well back in the maze. O. Schrutt may come out so fast that he'll leave the bloody evidence this time. And if not, then at least I'll be in there when he starts up again.
At least, there's been no indication that he'll let up. The fiend seems bent on keeping everyone up till the zoo opens. No wonder the animals always look so drowsy.
You may think, Graff, that I sound extreme. But if there's an ulterior motive behind this zoo bust, it would certainly be the exposing of old O. - even if I don't know exactly what he is, yet.
I know where he's come from, though. Twenty or more years ago - it's common history what various O. Schrutts were up to. I know the route O. Schrutt has been, and I'll bet there are those along that route who'd be surprised to hear of O. Schrutt again. At least, there are those who'd be more than interested to find an O. Schrutt who still wears his nametag and has kept both epaulettes.
Ha! After how many atrocities to previous small mammals, how very fitting that old O. should end up here.
(CONTINUING:)
THE HIGHLY SELECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIEGFRIED JAVOTNIK: PRE-HISTORY II
My father and Gottlob Wut spent two years in the mountains of northern Slovenia. Twice they were lonesome and planned trips. The first one, to Austria, ended at the Radel Pass along the mountain border. The Austrian Army guards appeared very formal and thorough with their rifles and paper work at the checkpoint. Wut decided that they'd have to abandon the motorcycles to make a crossing feasible, so they drove back into the Slovenian mountains that same night. And the second trip, to Turkey, ended just south-east of Maribor at the Drava River, where the Ustashi had accomplished another massacre of Serbs the night before; an elbow of the Drava was clogged with corpses. My father would always remember a raft snagged in some deadfall along the bank. The raft was neatly piled with heads; the architect had attempted a pyramid. It was almost perfect. But one head near the peak had slipped out of place; its hair was caught between other heads, and it swung from face to face in the river wind; some faces watched the swinging, and some looked away. My father and Gottlob again drove back to the Slovenian mountains, near the village of Rogla, and that night slept in each other's arms.
In Rogla, an old peasant named Borsfa Durd kept them alive for the privilege of having rides on the sidecar model 600. Borsfa Durd was scared of the racer - he never understood what kept it upright - but he loved to sit toothless in the sidecar while my father bumped him over the mountains. Borsfa Durd got them fuel and food; he raided the Ustashi depot at Vitanje - until the August of '44, when he was returned to Rogla in a fellow-villager's mulch wagon. The terrified villager said the Ustashi had stood there kicking old Durd on his head on the wagon floor and shovelpacked mulch all around him; only the soles of his shoes were visible at the peak of the mulch mound, when everyone tried to extricate him for a proper burial in Rogla. But the mulch was too wet and heavy, too hardpacked, so a certain mass of mulch was chopped and rolled off the wagon into a hole; the hole was circle-shaped because that was the appropriate cut of the mulch mass, which was said to contain Borsfa Durd. Although no one really saw more of him than the soles of his shoes, the fellow-villager who'd brought him back, in his reeking wagon, testified that it was Borsfa Durd without a doubt - and Gottlob Wut said he recognized the shoes.
So Borsfa Durd was buried coffinless in a chunk of mulch, which ended the fuel-and-food supply for the runaway motorcycles and their keepers. My father and Gottlob Wut thought they'd better move; if the Ustashi at the depot in Vitanje were at all curious as to why Borsfa Durd had been raiding their supplies, Vratno and Gottlob could be expecting a visit. So they left, taking what Borsfa Durd had owned for clothes.
Relying on the topographical maps, they went over a route in the daytime, dressed as peasants and scouting on foot - the motorcycles were always stashed in brush; they'd walk five miles down the mountains, spotting the villages for small armies of any kind, and then five miles back to the motorcycles - out again on the bikes at night, this time in their Wehrmacht uniforms. By checking the route in the daytime, they not only knew how far away they were from villages, but they could drive most of the time with their headlights out and be reasonably confident of where they were going. They had some fuel left over from Borsfa Durd's next to last raid at Vitanje, but there's no doubt it would have been safer to abandon the motorcycles; they'd have run little risk, dressed as peasants and traveling on foot. This alternative, however, was never mentioned; it must be understood that t
he scout-outfit leader of Motorcycle Unit Balkan 4 had deserted the war in order to devote his time to motorcycles, not to escape anything in particular - especially on foot.
In fact, Gottlob Wut was such a bad walker that they couldn't for long keep up their routine of five miles out and back in one day. Wut developed shin splints, or water on the spine, or an ailment stemming from early childhood - when he had somehow cheated on his learning-to-walk responsibilities, and depended, even at that time, on wheels. Actually, he confessed to Vratno, it was just one wheel at first. Wut had been the unicycle champion of Neckarsulm Technical High School for three straight years. As far as Gottlob knew, he still held the school record for the unicycle: three hours and thirty-one minutes of steady wheeling and balancing with no rest and without touching the ground with heel or toe. This performance was recorded on Parents' Night too, on the speaker's platform - when hundreds of weary elders drooped and shifted on hard benches, praying for three hours and thirty-one minutes that Wut would fall and break his boring neck.
But Gottlob Wut simply needed a wheel or two under his spine, in order to stay even moderately upright for any length of time.
They were a long time in the mountains, with only one incident. They were in the habit of fishing for food, or raiding, at night, the villages they'd spotted in the daytime. But on the third of September, 1944, they'd been two days with nothing but berries and water when they fell in with an odd crew. Croats, they were - a ragged peasant army - on their way to join Mihailovich and his diehard Chetniks. Gottlob and my father, fortunately in Borsfa Durd's old clothes, were ambushed by them in a valley below Sv. Areh. The ambush was all shouts, a stick or two, and a very old gun fired in the air. The Croats were, among other things, lost, and they offered Vratno and Gottlob safe passage for good directions out of where they were. It was a very odd crew - Croats wanting to join up with Serbs! They had apparently all been unwillingly involved in a recent partisan-Ustashi massacre of Serbs, and had seen for themselves how the Serbs were abused. Of course, their position was hopeless; there couldn't have been any organized Chetniks of any account in Slovenia. But my father and Gottlob spent a day and an evening with them, eating off a captured cow and drinking a wine so new it was pulpy. Vratno told the Croats how Gottlob hadn't been able to talk since he was shot in the brain. Which excused old Wut from the Serbo-Croat.
The Croats said the Germans were losing the war.
The Croats also had a radio, which was how Vratno and Gottlob discovered the date as 3 September - and were able to confirm their guess that the year was '44. And that evening they heard a Communist communique on Radio Free Yugoslavia, concerning a partisan victory over the Germans at Lazarevats. The Croats wildly protested, saying they'd had it from Serb sources that the Chetniks were surrounding Lazarevats and therefore must have been responsible for the victory and the capture of some two hundred Germans. The Croats insisted there were no partisans within miles of Lazarevats; then one of them asked where Lazarevats was, and the poor, befuddled Croats bemoaned again how lost they were.
That same evening, Vratno excused Gottlob and himself. And plodded back to the motorcycles. He explained to the Croats how Gottlob's muteness caused him pain, and they had to find a doctor. The poor Croats were so hopeless; not one of them even had the sense to notice that my father and Gottlob went off in the opposite direction from how they'd been headed at the ambush.
Vratno gave Wut a translation of the radio broadcast.
'Mihailovich is a goner,' Wut said. 'The trouble with the Chetniks and all those fool Serbs is that they've got no idea of propaganda. They don't even have a party line - not so much as a slogan! There's nothing to grab on to. Now these partisans,' said Wut, 'they've got the radio controls, and a simple, unswerving line: defend Russia; communism is anti-Nazi; and the Chetniks really side with the Germans. Does it matter if it's true?' Wut asked. 'It's repeated and repeated, and it's very simply principled. The very essence,' said Wut, 'of effective propaganda.'
'I didn't know you had any ideas,' my father said.
'It's all in Mein Kampf,' said Wut, 'and you certainly have to agree. Adolf Hitler is the greatest propaganda artist of all time.'
